


Night and Day, You are The One

by Desmondasaurs



Series: The House on the Corner [3]
Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: F/F, F/M, Hutch gets philosophical, M/M, Reminiscing, Slice of Life, Starsky likes to cook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 12:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21428179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desmondasaurs/pseuds/Desmondasaurs
Summary: Hutch has a conversation with Sarah while Starsky makes their Forth of July lunch on the grill.
Relationships: Ken Hutchinson/David Starsky
Series: The House on the Corner [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1044383
Kudos: 12





	Night and Day, You are The One

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_(July 4, 2016)_

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Hutch got along with Sarah like he got along with most women he’d known in his lifetime. An awestruck kind of adoration. Whereas Before, he had always tried to find places to change himself to fit a woman’s passions and pass-times. Since he and Starsky had become WE in more than just the social sense, he’d looked back on his relationships with women and wondered at himself. How could he have ever thought that that was how it was supposed to be? The constant discomfort and struggle to be what they wanted him to be; to hide the embarrassing and lacking parts of himself.

The relationship he built with Starsky was nothing like that—He was just himself. Yes sometimes things were embarrassing, and yes sometimes he felt like maybe he could be better, more of what Starsky _deserved_ and less… Less THIS. But then Starsky would look at him, and that warm easy feeling of completeness would settle over him like a warm blanket. Fitting and effortless and perfect a thing as he’d ever known.

They’d had That conversation years ago, the conversation about the nature of their relationship, and the horrible six letter word that was common in the early eighties. They’d talked about being Out long before Starsky’s hair had gone grey, and before Hutch’s had faded from blonde to white. Before the extra pounds and creaking joints. Eighty-nine or so, in that little house they’d rented on a canal; so similar but so different to the one he’d lived in before. Newer, bigger. They’d been lying in bed, listening to the rare thunderstorm and the pattering of rain on the window, the buzzing glow of a streetlight casting tiger stripes of shadows across their bodies.

Starsky had been on his stomach, arms wound around a pillow, both too stressed and wound up to sleep. Worriedly nudging their feet together. The eighties had been anxious in and of themselves. Even out into the early nineties. Constantly living with this strange fear breathing at the backs of their necks. If it wasn’t the AIDS Crisis, and the media full of hate crimes, deaths and disease; then it was tension growing between them, stress from working on increasingly unrealistic scripts, with producers who wanted to turn policemen into vigilantes. Actors who cared more about how cool they looked with a weapon than how well they knew how to use it properly.

But that night they’d gone to bed silent, Hutch thinking about young Mickie who’d never really been able to truly leave the streets, as hard as she tried to go straight. She’d kicked the dope, and there’d been jobs; cosmetics representative, shop girl, secretary, even college student for a while… But the bills had been too high for any of those things, and she’d learned young how to line her pockets with thick notes. Plus, there was always that thrill, knowing she was wanted.

Hutch still remembered sitting by her hospital bed and thinking that this couldn’t be the same little girl they’d managed to pull from under Amboy’s thumb. This thin sick young woman couldn’t be Laughing Mickie.

There had been a few people at her funeral, but not many. She hadn’t been lying when she’d said she didn’t have nobody. Nobody but Starsky and Hutch who’d come to see her at Memorial when things had got heavy. Brought her flowers and treated her like the acronym wasn’t all she was now. She’d left them what little she had. A box of clothes, a hamster she’d named ChubChub, who liked to stuff his cheeks with paper towels and waddle around in his little ball, and some stocks and stuff she’d picked up from boyfriends. None of whom cared to come see her off in her final days.

Starsky hadn’t had the foggiest idea what to do with stocks, so he’d handed the papers to Huggy who said he had a cousin in the Trade business and they’d forgotten about it for the most part.

Mickie had been the one to ask the question, to plant that seed in Hutch’s mind.

“You ever have to wear shoes ‘at don’t fit?” But she hadn’t been talking about shoes.

It had been the necessity of it. How one can’t go out in public without shoes and be taken seriously. Shoes and relationships, you can wear it because you have to, because it looks good to the people around you… but if it doesn’t fit all it does is hurt, blister or break your bones slowly. Leave you bent into painful, unnatural shapes.

Hutch didn’t think he’d ever really FIT in a relationship with a woman… Not one that had survived anyway. But even then, he wondered if things would have stayed as wonderful as they had appeared at the time with Gillian. Or if the way they wove through one another’s lives would have become strangling over time.

With Starsky it was different, because it wasn’t so much weaving through the other’s life, more as fitting together to form something stronger.

All those years ago, Mickie had suggested that the reason she hadn’t been able to stay away from it was because it was how she fit into life. That it was a risk she’d taken, and wound up paying for. But, as she’d said, she’d seen more of the world, and of the nature of civilization than most teenagers thrown out by their parents. Her boyfriends had taken her to Barcelona, the Bahamas, Mexico, Spain, Rome, France! They’d bought her jewelry more expensive than the car she’d driven and the apartment she’d rented in the few years she’d been on the straight and narrow. They hadn’t cared when she’d hocked most of it to help kids who didn’t fit into that life get out. Give them the chance and the choice that she’d gotten after Amboy.

_‘What about you, huh?’_ The idea of her in Hutch’s mind gave him a crooked grin, as young and beautiful as she’d been at her too early prime, _‘Where do you fit?’_

So, Hutch thought, and brooded on it, and on the other side of the bed Starsky brooded with him, on different topics.

They’d laid awake for hours until finally Starsky’d had enough and nudged Hutch’s ankle a little more emphatically. “What’s eatin’ you?”

He’d evaded at first, said it was ‘nothing’ but continued to think too hard.

“Come on,” Starsky plumped the pillow under his head, “Maybe if we talk about it we can get a few hours of sleep before morning.”

“It’s just something that Mickie said.”

“Mickie?” Starsky’s face was solemn, “That time of year again?” He glanced at the clock, made a note to call the flower shop.

“It’s just that… all my life, you’ve been the only one I’ve ever fit with. The only person I didn’t have to change for.”

“You’ve changed for me. Just like I’ve changed for you—”

Hutch had smiled soft in the dim light through the blinds. “But it doesn’t hurt. I’m still me, not who I think I should be to love you.”

Starsky hummed in understanding, “And this is keeping you awake why?”

He didn’t answer immediately, let the words form in his mind before he spoke them. “I think it’s just me realizing that I didn’t ‘go gay for you’… I think I’ve always been this way, but I’ve just tried so hard to fit where my family, and society told me I should be. Tried to cut myself down to fit into these shoes a man is supposed to fill. But with you… With you I didn’t need to cut anything, I just fit. We just fit.”

Starsky’s looking at him gently, pulls a hand out from under his head and finds the blonde’s where it’s folded neatly on his chest, wraps their fingers together.

“What were you thinking about?” Hutch said after a moment, once the words are out there and he feels like maybe now he can sleep.

Starsky closes his eyes and snuggles down, “Thinking’ about that jackass director Whoosits, and his whole ‘real men can take a bullet without flinching’ thing.”

Hutch giggles.

“Was wondering what kind of trouble I’d get into if I put him in a vest and showed him what a slug really feels like.”

“More trouble than we’re worth to the studio, I promise you.”

“Yeah, but they can’t stop me from dreaming about it.”

Hutch chuckled, “Yeah… Just—I just, part of me thought gay men were a certain way.”

“You readin’ my lines?” Starsky didn’t even open his eyes. “Thought I was the one who was supposed to be stuck on ‘stereotypes’.”

“Yeah, guess you’re right.”

“And you’re fussy… You’re not fussy like Pablo’s fussy. But you’re fussy.”

“Pablo is from Miami. He says gay men are a different breed in Miami.”

“Well, there you go. You’re from Minnesota… Different breed.”

“And you?”

“Hmm… I like women too,” He rubbed his face on the pillow, wiggled bodily a little closer to Hutch and rubbed against his thigh. Slurred out; “Bicycle.”

Hutch giggled, high and helplessly amused.

“Bisexual—Jesus, stop laughin’!”

He hadn’t been able to, and Starsky had groped at him blindly and pulled him close, into a bear like hug. Covered his head with a pillow playfully. Then released him and complained that he was gonna be cranky tomorrow if Hutch didn’t shut up and go to sleep.

Years later, sitting there in the back yard with Sarah beside him he thought of Mickie, thought of a lot of things while watching Starsky at the grill, tapping his feet to some music only he could hear, while Kelly played with Ziggy.

“When did you know?” Sarah said, eyes still on her daughter.

“I was in my thirties… Starsky—He claims he knew in his mid-twenties, but sometimes I think he has selective memory.”

“Kelly’s insisted since she could talk that she didn’t like boys. That she wanted to have a wife. I never tried to indulge her, or persuade her differently… But, she’s always insisted—And she’s going to be starting school in the fall, so… I just—I don’t want her to be bullied, or get her heart broken. Or have someone tell her she can’t have a wife if that’s what she really wants.”

Hutch nodded, thoughtfully, watched the girl and the greyhound bounding around the yard. “She’s got a long time to figure herself out.”

“I just don’t want to make her feel like there’s something wrong with her, you know?”

He did know, but he didn’t say that. Didn’t let himself wonder how things would have been different if he hadn’t grown up thinking that he had to be a man, have a wife, like women. Be what women wanted. What it would have been like to grow up not thinking he was too much and yet not enough.

“Just love her, that’s all you can do,” Hutch took a slow drink of his tea, “Dave and I—in the early double aughts’… we fostered some kids. There was a boy, about fifteen— he’d come out to his parents and they’d turned on him… He spent a few months with us, then the state moved him east to live with family,” He hesitated, didn’t say how it had hurt to see Luis go. How Starsky had been quiet and withdrawn for almost a full month after. That even now sometimes he got quiet thinking about the boy. Hutch sighed, “It takes a lot of love to undo the world’s cruelty… Sometimes it’ll feel like you don’t have enough in you to do it. But all you can do is try and hope for the best.”

Sarah looked at him, for a moment felt as if she could see the weight of the words inside him. Memories and old scars. She didn’t say anything, looked away to give him his dignity.

Hutch took a breath and cleared his throat, changed the subject; “Sometimes I wonder,” He said softly. “What life would have been like if either of us had had children.”

Sarah propped on her chin hand, “You would have made good dads,” She took another drink of her tea; “But I think you make better uncles, and mentors, and neighbors. You can be a safe place when someone needs it—when they’ll appreciate it most.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah… I mean—I’d have been lost without you two. Kelly—I don’t like to think about what would have happened if I’d had to leave Kelly with Missus Edgewood all day.”

“I told you, it’s no trouble to watch her. She’s a wonderful kid. Keeps Starsky on his toes.”

Sarah smiled, grateful; “It’s not just that… If it weren’t for you two I wouldn’t be able to go to school or work. Not with a clear conscience. You’re giving my daughter love, attention, and education while I’m working toward giving us a better life. It’s—it’s such a relief that I don’t have to worry about her. I don’t have to worry about her father showing up, or if she’s being given the attention she needs. It’s like—” She paused. “I imagined what my dad would have been like when I was a kid. How we’d play catch, and go to museums together. I imagined what it would have been like if he’d been there when Kelly was born, and it was like this. Just like this.”

Hutch followed the little girl with his eyes.

“Know what I didn’t think about?”

“What?”

“How my dad would have yelled at me when I was a kid and did stupid things. How angry he would have been, catching me sneaking out at night to go to parties. Drinking, smoking, having sex, driving cars without a license—”

Hutch cocked an eyebrow at her, but she continued.

“—I don’t think about how my mom worried, or how hard being a parent to a pregnant teenager with an abusive boyfriend was,” She paused, took a breath, “I don’t think about how strong she had to be for me, because that wasn’t fun. It wasn’t the ‘happy’ side of parenting. It’s the side my dad never got to see, what I can’t imagine him doing. It’s the part I can’t help but think of every time I think of my mother. She didn’t get the chance to have the fun times. She had to be mother and father for me.”

Hutch was quiet.

“Ken, you guys lived that every day, not for your own kids like my mom did, but for every kid—every person in Bay City. You did that for everyone. You put your lives on the line every day for people you would probably never see or meet… It’s time you got more of the good things out of it.”

“You know about all that?” Hutch felt color rising to his face, stared at the flecks of loose leaf at the bottom of his mug. “About us?”

“I Googled you guys after you helped me get our stuff upstairs… I just didn’t know how to bring it up.”

He gave a little grunt of acknowledgement. Felt weirdly vulnerable. There was a lot of information on the internet. Formal information, stuff that was public knowledge. But Sarah was smart, she’d pieced things together, and could guess the rest.

“You two—I can’t even imagine how you did all that and didn’t become curmudgeons like Missus Edgewood!”

Hutch’s mouth opened, words—Something about it being duty, that they’d wanted to help make the world a better place, they didn’t need thanks, but—

Starsky gave a whoop from the grill and loudly proclaimed it food. Turned and made grabby pincer motions with his tongs at Kelly’s floppy hat; “Even got Her Highness a coupla’ kosher hotdogs!”

“What about Ziggy? He wants a hotdog too!” Kelly wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck and pouted up at Starsky through her glasses.

“Yeah, Ziggy gets a hotdog too!”

Hutch raised his head; “Ziggy does NOT get a hotdog too!”

“Oh, two? He gets two hotdogs?” Starsky nudged the wieners with his tongs, “Hear that? He gets two!”

Kelly was cheering and Ziggy was prancing around excitedly, expecting a snack.

Hutch met Sarah’s eyes with a disparaging grin; “He keeps me young.”

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